Tag Archives: environment

Upcoming Talks at St. Thomas University

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Next month I will be giving two talks at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis. I’ll be focussing on how environmental communication needs to help build a culture of sustainability (or whatever you prefer to call an ecologically and socially just future) while it tries to address immediate issues. Here are the summaries.

April 25: The Role of Communication in Transitioning to a Culture that Supports Sustainability

Achieving sustainability will require more than just clean energy sources, protecting the oceans, eliminating poverty and the rest of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. To support all of these, we need a transition to a culture of sustainability. That means our beliefs, values, aesthetics, worldviews, and institutions – in sum, our culture, must change. For that to happen, communication about ourselves and our place in the world must necessarily evolve. We need a new story about who we are as a species.

April 26: Talking Like a Mountain: Climate, Nature and the Futures We Represent

In the short to medium term, environmental communicators urgently need to find more effective ways to convince people and organizations to act to protect the Earth and its inhabitants. That communication must also cultivate the kinds of values and perceptions of the world that will support long-term ecological and social sustainability. That’s “talking like a mountain.”

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Visual Environmental Communication book

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Visual Environmental CommunicationRoutledge has a new book out now on Visual Environmental Communication, edited by Anders Hansen and David Machin. The book contains a number of papers that were part of a special issue of Environmental Communication. My paper with Bruno Takahashi, “The Nature of Time: How the Covers of the World’s Most Widely-Read Weekly News Magazine Visualize Environmental Affairs” is included in the book.

It’s a great collection of papers, certainly suitable for a course. And in case you are wondering, I get no money from the book sales. I signed the paper over to Routledge and that’s that. Continue reading →

Headlining Energy Issues: A Content Analysis of Ethanol Headlines in the U.S. Elite Press

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Bruno Takahashi, Carol Terracina-Hartman, Katie Amann, and Mark S. Meisner “Headlining Energy Issues: A Content Analysis of Ethanol Headlines in the U.S. Elite Press,” presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) 2014 Conference, Montréal, Québec, August 8, 2014. Continue reading →

Consciousness Raising

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Achieving_Sustainability_CoverMark S. Meisner “Consciousness Raising,” in Achieving Sustainability: Visions, Principles, and Practices, Vol. 1, Ed. Debra Rowe, pp.155-158. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2014.

“As a strategy for social change, consciousness raising can be defined as a form of communication or any activity aimed at increasing people’s awareness of specific conditions and/or ways to address them. In the sustainability context, this means raising awareness about social and environmental issues and problems, as well as about sustainable alternatives. For example, consciousness raising can mean educating people about the risks of biocides and the industrial food system as well as promoting local organic agriculture as an alternative. Either way, the purpose is to get the broader public interested in the cause and then engaged in doing something about it. Consciousness raising is thus a crucial first step in solving social problems….”

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Re-examining the Media-Policy Link: Climate Change and Government Elites in Peru

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CulturePoliticsandClimateChangeBruno Takahashi & Mark S. Meisner “Re-examining the Media-Policy Link: Climate Change and Government Elites in Peru,” Chapter 6 in Culture, Politics & Climate Change: How Information Shapes our Common Future, Edited by Deserai A. Crow and Maxwell T. Boykoff. London: Routledge, 2014.

Abstract

The ways in which the mass media report on policy and scientific issues such as climate change have an influence on the attention to–and understanding of–such issues by decision makers. However, the study of such influence has been quite limited. This chapter is motivated by this gap in the literature, as well as by limited research about media and climate change in developing countries. We want to understand the ways in which media coverage of climate change interacts with individual traits (e.g. values, knowledge, attitudes) of national legislators in Peru, and how such interaction influences the design of policies. Additionally, it focuses on the circumstances that allow such effects to occur. The results reveal that a low policy information environment, coupled with issue attributes, enables both the media and alternative sources of information such as the Internet to play an important role in shaping how legislators perceive the issue and act upon it. In a highly vulnerable country such as Peru, the need to increase information of local issues related to climate change is necessary.

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The Nature of Time: How the Covers of the World’s Most Widely-Read Weekly News Magazine Visualize Environmental Affairs

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Time-1970-02-02Mark S. Meisner & Bruno Takahashi “The Nature of Time: How the Covers of the World’s Most Widely-Read Weekly News Magazine Visualize Environmental Affairs,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, Vol.7 No.2, pp. 255-276, 2013.

Abstract

Scholars of environmental communication acknowledge the importance of visual representations in shaping perceptions and actions in relation to environmental affairs. Unlike with other media, including newspapers, television and film, research on the visualization of nature and environmental issues in magazines is rare. This study focuses on the covers of Time magazine, one of the world’s most influential news weeklies. A data set that includes all relevant covers from 1923 to 2011 is examined using a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis to analyze the visual representation of nature and environmental issues. The results show that the presence of environmental issues and nature on the covers has increased over the decades. Furthermore Time takes an advocacy position on some environmental issues, but it is a shallow one that is weakly argued through less-than-engaging imagery and fails to offer much in the way of solutions or agency to the reader.

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So it’s all good then

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On the so-called environmental crisis…

Singer-Pessimist, Optimist, Activist
© Andy Singer. Used with permission

When things start to look like they are going down the toilet and there is no obvious way out, what do you do?

In the BBC TV series Twenty-Twelve, the fictional Head of Deliverance for the London 2012 olympics, Ian Fletcher, always finds something positive in the situation and a new angle from which to approach the issue. And then he wraps up the conversation with the line “So it’s all good then.” At that point, everyone gets back to work.

And so it is in the world of environmental affairs. No matter how bad things seem, there is no point giving up or assuming that nothing can be done. If someone is going to do that, they may as well stay home. Pessimism is as useful as the oil “dispersant” Corexit was to the Gulf of Mexico: better left in the bottle.

Similarly, simply passively hoping that environmental issues will work themselves out serves no useful purpose. Optimism in this context allows people to feel better enough to rationalize ignoring reality. That too is like Corexit: pour on some optimism and hope the mess goes away.

We can’t sit back and expect someone else to “fix” things any more than we can indulge ourselves in despair.

Face it, the future is unpredictable. There is no way to anticipate all of the changes that are coming. As poet Paul Valery is reported to have said, “The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.”

But we can help to create the future, or at least try to. And in order to do that, we need to be realistic (i.e. knowledgeable, not rigidly ideological) about our situation. We also need a positive attitude (not the same as optimism) towards the work, and good critical thinking skills. We have to look at things afresh, figure out another way and then lean in and try something. There are still so many positive choices available to us.

To quote environmental thinker David Orr in his book Hope is an Imperative:

Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. In contrast to optimism or despair, hope requires that one actually do something to improve the world. Authentic hope comes with an imperative to act.

I guess that about sums it up.

Environmental Discourses and Discourse Coalitions in the Reconfiguration of Peru’s Environmental Governance

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Ministry of Environment of PeruBruno Takahashi & Mark Meisner “Environmental Discourses and Discourse Coalitions in the Reconfiguration of Peru’s Environmental Governance,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, Vol.6, No.3, 346-364, 2012.

Abstract

Environmental discourses are considered precursors to policy decisions as they delimit the range of policy options. The mass media are an important arena for those discourses and the discourse coalitions engaged in struggles to define policy and political issues. The study of such discourses requires an expansion to contexts outside developed countries, but within the influence of global forces, especially in how dominant global discourses influence national policy making. This article focuses on the competing discourses in the debate about the creation of the Peruvian Ministry of the Environment as portrayed by the media and the actors involved in the process. The results show a debate dominated by neoliberal discourses of administrative rationalism and economic rationalism, intertwined with the environmental requirements of a free trade agreement between Peru and the USA. In this case, democratic and environmental justice concerns—from both indigenous rights and anti-hegemonic perspectives—were marginalized. The study presents the operationalization of theoretical categorizations of environmental discourses within the concepts of storylines and discourse coalitions.

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Mass-Media Coverage of Climate Change in Peru: Framing and the Role of Foreign Voices

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AcrossBordersBruno Takahashi & Mark Meisner “Mass-Media Coverage of Climate Change in Peru: Framing and the Role of Foreign Voices” in Across Borders and Environments: Communication and Environmental Justice in International Contexts, ed. Stacey Sowards, Cincinnati: International Environmental Communication Association, 2012.

Abstract

Media coverage of climate change has been an area of continued research during the last few years, mostly with a focus on developed countries. This study attempts to contribute to this body of work by analyzing the coverage in a developing country. The study presents a content analysis of newspaper coverage of climate change in Peru through the study of frames, geographical focus, and climate change strategies (mitigation/adaptation). Additionally, the role of foreign voices is assessed by comparing news coverage by Peruvian reporters with the news coverage by wire services and by determining the types of sources present in the articles. Results show a prevalence of an effects frame, followed by a politics frame. Also, the study found a significant number of stories originating from wire services. In general, coverage prioritizes mitigation strategies and policies while providing limited attention to adaptation, which can be inadequate for a highly vulnerable country.

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Climate Change in Peruvian Newspapers: The Role of Foreign Voices in a Context of Vulnerability

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El-ComercioBruno Takahashi & Mark Meisner “Climate Change in Peruvian Newspapers: The Role of Foreign Voices in a Context of Vulnerability,” Public Understanding of Science, Vol.22 No.4, 427-442, 2013 (first published online February 20, 2012).

Abstract

Media coverage of climate change has been an area of continued research during the last years, mostly with a focus on developed countries. This study attempts to contribute to this body of work by analyzing the coverage in a developing country. The study presents a content analysis of newspaper coverage of climate change in Peru through the study of frames, geographical focus, and climate change strategies (mitigation/adaptation). Additionally, the role of foreign voices is assessed by comparing the coverage by Peruvian reporters with the coverage by wire services, and by determining the types of sources present in the articles. Results show a prevalence of an effects frame, followed by a politics frame. Also, the study found a significant amount of stories originating from wire services. In general, coverage prioritizes mitigation strategies and policies while providing limited attention to adaptation, which can be insufficient for a highly vulnerable country.

Continue reading →